
The Medellín Cartel

The Medellín Cartel, one of the most iconic and violent drug trafficking organizations in Colombia’s history, consolidated its control over the international cocaine trade during the 1980s and 1990s.
To maintain its hegemony, the cartel used a combination of extreme violence and corruption of state institutions, bribing public officials such as political leaders, judges, and security forces, while eliminating any rivals or critics through bomb attacks, kidnappings, and assassinations.
After the death of its top leader, Pablo Escobar, in 1993, the group fragmented and ceased to exist as a cohesive organization.
History
Pablo Escobar, a pioneer in large-scale cocaine trafficking, founded the Medellín Cartel during the 1970s together with the brothers Jorge Luis, Juan David, and Fabio Ochoa, and other associates such as Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, alias “El Mexicano,” and Carlos Lehder, alias “El Loco,” to build an empire based on the production, distribution, and sale of cocaine.
In its early years, the group established international cocaine trafficking routes from Colombia to the United States, becoming a pioneer in the mass production and export of the drug. By the early 1980s, the organization was estimated to be supplying more than 80% of all cocaine trafficked to the US, sending some 15 tons of the drug a day. The cartel gained popularity among Medellín’s poor sectors as Escobar financed social projects while simultaneously building a vast network of corruption within state institutions.
The Medellín Cartel was composed of several family clans that were required to pay a percentage of their earnings to Escobar. To facilitate debt collection, Escobar founded the Oficina de Envigado. Operating from an office within the town hall of Envigado, a municipality adjacent to Medellín, Escobar collected money owed to him by other drug traffickers in the Medellín Cartel. Any trafficker who fell behind with their payments could be threatened and beaten, or even killed, by members of the Oficina de Envigado.
As the Medellín Cartel’s influence grew, Colombia was experiencing a critical period in its internal conflict. The kidnappings perpetrated by guerrilla groups led the state and private actors to seek alternatives to counter these threats. In November 1981, the rebel group M-19 kidnapped Marta Nieves Ochoa, sister of the Ochoa brothers, and demanded $12 million for her release. However, instead of paying the ransom, the drug traffickers formed the group “Death to Kidnappers” (Muerte a Secuestradores – MAS), an alliance between businessmen, ranchers, and criminals. This marked the birth of Colombia’s first paramilitary structures, establishing a model of private violence that would redefine the country’s armed conflict.
However, the relationship between the Medellín Cartel and the Colombian government was also fraught with tension. In the mid-80s, the administration President Belisario Betancur began considering extradition as a strategy to counter the growing influence of drug traffickers. The cartel took swift action, assassinating the Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. The government reacted by approving extradition, prompting Escobar’s hitmen to murder dozens of judges, police officers, and journalists, throughout the late 1980s. During the 1989 presidential elections, Escobar’s assassins murdered Luis Carlos Galán Sarmiento, the Liberal Party candidate. They later attempted to kill the candidate who took his place, César Gaviria Trujillo.
Between 1980 and 1993, the Medellín Cartel and the self-proclaimed “the extraditables” — a coalition of drug traffickers from various criminal organizations facing extradition — used large-scale bombings, political kidnappings, and selective assassinations of judges, journalists, police officers, and left-wing militants. This campaign of violence, often carried out with the collaboration of the MAS and some members of the state security forces, aimed to intimidate and eliminate threats to the cartel’s primary goal: avoiding extradition to the United States.
However, this war against the state took its toll on the Medellín Cartel. Escobar’s key ally, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, alias “El Mexicano,” was shot and killed by the Colombian police in mid-December 1989. The Ochoa brothers turned themselves in to the authorities and negotiated reduced prison sentences. In 1991, shortly after the Constituent Assembly ruled that extradition violated the Constitution, Escobar negotiated his surrender. He secured the construction of a luxurious prison in Envigado, overlooking Medellín, where he and his men would serve their sentences: The Cathedral. This deal temporarily halted the violence, but it did not end the cartel’s operations.
Despite the privileges he enjoyed in The Cathedral, by 1992 Escobar felt he was losing control of the Medellín Cartel. All cartel-affiliated traffickers were still required to pay a monthly fee to the Oficina de Envigado to continue doing business, but many began to resent these payments. From Escobar’s perspective, however, his time in prison should have relieved pressure on him and allowed his associates to increase his profits without major obstacles.
In 1992, after authorities discovered that Escobar was still running his empire from prison, the Colombian government attempted to transfer him to a different facility. Escobar escaped. During his time in La Catedral, he had made a long list of enemies, who soon formed the group known as the Persecuted by Pablo Escobar (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar – PEPES).
The PEPES emerged from an alliance between the Castaño family, Carlos, Fidel and Vicente Castaño, founders of one of Colombia’s first paramilitary groups, and Don Berna, an Escobar partner turned rival after the Medellín drug lord murdered Don Berna’s partners Gerardo “Kiko” Moncada and Fernando Galeano in prison in July 1992. According to Carlos Castaño, the first PEPE’s meeting took place in mid-August 1992, a few days after Escobar fled The Catedral. Don Berna represented other powerful criminal clans, but, according to him, Fidel Castaño was the undisputed leader of the PEPES.
By the late 1980s, the Colombian government, with support from the United States, had intensified its efforts to dismantle the cartel. In 1993, authorities located Escobar in a house in the Los Olivos neighborhood of Medellín and shot him dead.
After Escobar’s death, the Medellín Cartel was believed to be finished. However, under the leadership of Don Berna, the organization became one of the most sophisticated mafias in Colombia. Unlike Escobar, who opted for a strategy of direct attack against the state, Don Berna learned from his predecessor’s mistakes and opted for corrupting government officials and security forces. His approach allowed him to establish key alliances with bureaucratic elites, making these connections his most powerful tool. Although he avoided Escobar’s ostentatious lifestyle, Don Berna maintained the cartel’s characteristic brutality, reinforcing his control. Under his leadership, the Medellín Cartel evolved into a more sophisticated model of organized crime, consolidated in the Oficina de Envigado. This structure became the regulatory axis of the underworld in Medellín and much of Colombia, operating as a “prosecutor’s office” for crime.
Leadership
Initially, the Ochoa brothers were the cartel’s strategists, while Pablo Escobar provided “protection” services. Other partners, such as Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, supplied manpower and logistical support for the group’s criminal operations.
Over time, Escobar became the undisputed leader of the cartel, while also controlling much of its armed wing. His “sicarios” (hitmen), mostly young men from Medellín’s slums, carried out the cartel’s most violent operations, such as assassinations and car bombs.
Although the Medellín Cartel was composed of numerous members and clans — who either trafficked drugs using Escobar’s routes or operated independently — they all paid him a percentage of their profits, acting under his consent and protection.
After Escobar’s death in the mid-1990s, the short-lived leadership of Don Berna began. He established key alliances with bureaucratic elites, leaving a legacy of institutional infiltration that became embedded in criminal operations in Colombia. Don Berna took charge of the Oficina de Envigado, which replaced the Medellín Cartel as the city’s dominant criminal organization.
Geography
At its peak, the Medellín Cartel operated nationally and internationally, controlling key cocaine trafficking routes connecting Colombia with markets in the United States and Western Europe. Its influence in Colombia was concentrated in Antioquia, with Medellín as its center of operations. The cartel also extended its reach into strategic regions such as the Caribbean in northern Colombia, Orinoquía, and Amazonía regions in eastern and southern Colombia, where cocaine was produced and transported. Outside Colombia, the cartel established logistical networks in Mexico, Panama, and the United States, using air and sea routes to guarantee the constant flow of drugs to the main global markets.
Allies and enemies
The Medellín Cartel forged strategic alliances and faced powerful enemies during its rise and fall. Its main allies included early paramilitary groups that protected trafficking routes and eliminated local threats.
These alliances, together with the bribes paid to politicians, judges, and security forces, allowed the cartel to expand and operate with relative impunity for years.
However, the cartel had formidable enemies. It faced the Cali Cartel, its primary rival in drug trafficking, and the PEPES, a coalition of former allies, rivals, and state forces that played a crucial role in Escobar’s downfall.
Prospects
The Medellín Cartel was one of Colombia’s most powerful and violent criminal organizations. Its legacy extends beyond drug trafficking, as it transformed the dynamics of organized crime and left an indelible mark on Colombia’s history.
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